Performer: Lauren Worsham

Ted Sperling conducts Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s musical Show Boat at Avery Fisher Hall featuring a star-studded cast (Vanessa Williams, Norm Lewis, Julian Ovenden, Fred Willard, Lauren Worsham).

Henri Bergson famously defined comedy as “something mechanical encrusted on the living”. One suspects that Jacques Offenbach would have been a fan of this definition, and that Christopher Alden most certainly is.

The Brooklyn Festival, a week-long celebration of the new music scene from New York City’s “most dynamic borough”, was launched on Tuesday 16 April with a Green Umbrella concert at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles.Interestingly enough, the festival came hard on the heels of another festival which ended Sunday, the Hear Now Music Festival.